this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Loving the nonchalantness.
Copyright infringement is not a crime. It's grounds for a civil suit, but it looks really bad for Sony entertainment to try to bleed tens of thousands of dollars from a poor family trying to watch a movie they couldn't afford to watch in theaters.
Possessing or viewing CSAM is so severe a crime, you need a lawyer to dispose of it. To not do so is to stay in possession of it, which is a felony. To destroy it is destruction of evidence, which is a felony. Your only recourse is to stuff it in an unmarked box, and ask your lawyer to anonymously hand it over to the local precinct. It is essentially social toxic waste.
ETA [rant] Note that a) Sony (and all the other major studios and publishers and record labels) gladly pirates IP that is not theirs, and also underpays the people that produce their content. And b) Sony freely engages in dark patterns and odious TOSes which is one of the reasons I haven't been able to play Sony games in years. So it is actually more ethical to pirate Sony content (or again, that of any major studio, record label, publishing house or AAA game company) than it is to pay the company and support their ongoing abuse of workers, end consumers and the market.
Also there is one thing you can do to them that is worse than pirating their content, and that is not pirating their content. [/rant]
I dont think the person you replied to talkes about morals but about legality. I do not know about the laws in your country but copyright infringement is a real crime that could allow the police to search my home and seize my devices. Nobody here would argue about csam beeing worse but that was not the point for sure.
If you're in the US, the police can search your home anyway if it thinks it has cause to do so. Misinforming a judge in order to get a search warrant and permission for a SWAT raid is routine in the US, and just a matter of whether they're looking to harass you and your neighborhood. Misuse of dubious informants is common. In this case, cause to do so tends to be more about assets that the officers can seize than sufficient crimes require intervention. US law enforcement likes big convictions, but it likes lootable money and assets even more.
Normally, copyright infringement is not grounds to raid someone's home, and while corporate lawyers will send nastygrams when your IP addy is found on a seeding list, that is not sufficient proof that a given individual in that house is responsible. Still, once the police decide you're a bad guy they'll look for something, anything to pin on you, and are allowed to lie to you in the process of investigation (or torturing a confession out of you), so shut up and ask to speak to your lawyer.
In the UK, it appears the police are even less regulated, given parliament has sent brute squads to news agencies to dispose of embarrassing data.
In both cases, it's a matter of being too small to be noticed by law enforcement (or too expensive to media companies to prosecute).
If you are a big enough fish, a media company will hire ICE (that is the US Immigrant and Customs Enforcement) which hires itself out as an all-purpose brute squad with police authority, when it's not hunting for immigrants. ICE flew to New Zealand to Raid the Kim Dotcom estate in January 2012 (which we still hypothesize was less about piracy and more about a new music distribution system that was going to compete with the record labels). Note that the shotgun blast of charges against Dotcom didn't include copyright infringement, but were ambiguous like espionage, conspiracy and violation of the CFAA all of which are difficult not to do if you're a normal person on the internet.